Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3: 1-CD Installation & Multimedia support

openSUSE 10.3 has seen a lot of changes with the media selection; the most prominent one being the new 1-CD installation for KDE, and 1-CD installtion for GNOME. Multimedia support in the distribution has also been improved, with MP3 support out-of-the-box for Banshee and Amarok. Today we bring you a special double-bill covering these two stories, and we’ll be talking to Michael Loeffler, the Product Manager of openSUSE, to give us a little more insight.

Media Changes

1-CD Installation

In the past, openSUSE releases were primarily provided over 5 open source software (OSS) CDs, 1 optional non-oss add-on CD, or the 1 DVD which was the sum of those CDs. Though you only needed 3 of the first 5 OSS CDs for a default KDE and GNOME installation, it was not seen as an ideal scenario. The DVD provided all of the necessary packages and still gave the user the choice of desktop environment, but it was around 3.7 GB which can be a real hassle to download on slow connections.
So what has changed? Now the 5 OSS CDs have been commpletely dropped, and in their place comes two new CDs: